In this article, I provide step by step instructions to grow your LinkedIn 3rd degree connections to 2+ Million within two weeks. This is especially useful if you are generating leads from LinkedIn. (SDR, Sales, Marketing, Recruiting, coaching…)

Why is growing your 3rd degree LinkedIn network important?

Even though LinkedIn has 400M+ people, you only get access to people that you are connected to by at least 3rd degree. For every person you connect with, LinkedIn will provide you access to that person’s network (2nd degree), as well that person’s connection’s network. (3rd degree). So for every person you connect with, your network can grow by 1K to 100K people depending on how connected that person is. So it is important you develop a strategy to ensure all your prospects are somehow connected to you within 3rd degree – else, they won’t be visible to you. (its relatively easy to get Millions, once you know how – I will show you how later in this article)

For a LinkedIn search of prospects, it is quite possible you get to see less than 100 people, while your competitor gets to see 10,000+ . That’s because your competitor is connected to more relevant people via their 3rd degree network than you. This puts you & your company at a huge disadvantage in generating appointments

Even if you have a premium or Sales Navigator account, you won’t see more names than those in your 3rd degree & Groups. The advantage of those paid accounts are – you get to shortlist the results with more filters. So even with these paid accounts, to see more people, you must increase the size of your 3rd degree network.

This article gives a way to find how big your visible network is in an industry or field. It also shows a quick way to connect with LIONS and other ways to increase your 3rd degree network rapidly. Using these techniques, you can increase your 3rd degree network by several million within 2 weeks.

As a rough rule, your 3rd degree network will grow by 1K — 10K+ for every well connected person you add as a 1st degree connection.

As a first step, get base value of what your current 3rd degree size is by following steps below. Write the number. Check every few days to see how well your network is growing. (You can report the growth to your boss and get brownie points!)

Click link below to find LIONs that you can connect with to expand your network rapidly. Click on Industry to connect with people in the industry you want to search for prospects or expand your network

As a general rule, people who write LION on their profile are willing to connect with any person that wants to connect with them. So don’t worry about getting rejected. At best they will ignore you

Please note, each LION or any person on LinkedIn is limited to 30,000 connections – so it is best to look for people who have far less than 30K contacts. They are more likely to connect to anyone than those with 25K+ contacts

2 – Connect with people that network with your prospects OR people that know your prospects

When you connect with a person, that person’s entire 1st & 2nd degree network will become your 2nd & 3rd degree contacts. Even though the person connecting with you may not reveal their contacts to you, LinkedIn knows who they are & they will show them in your search results 🙂

Here are types of people I recommend you connect with. As a general rule, you can expect a person with 500 contacts to add 100K+ people to your 3rd degree network! That is worth picking up a phone to call them or getting them a coffee.

Connect with all sales, marketing & executives in your company – this will immediately give you a multiplier effect of several million 3rd degree connections.

Connect with all prospects you get in touch with, regardless of their intent to buy now or never – the chances are, they are hanging around where your prospects are, and they will be visible via a LinkedIn search to you if you are connected.

Look at your customer’s profile, and join groups they have in common – this will get you in front of more people like them

CEO’s (Management) must have a list of internal executives & staff + groups, their new sales & marketing recruits should connect with as part of their on-boarding process. This will be a win-win for everyone in their company. The network of new employees also become part of the network of others in the company!

3 – Join relevant LinkedIn groups

Joining a LinkedIn group, is just like visiting a industry trade show and getting a list of all attendees. It doesn’t cost anything to join. You can join up to 50 groups for free. There are 2M groups to search and pick from. why wouldn’t you join?

As far as LinkedIn is concerned, it assumes everyone in a group is part of your 3rd degree network (whether you are connected or not) and shows them as prospects in your search results. Join groups that are in the industry you want to target OR have the keywords or technologies your prospects are likely to associate with OR have the title at which you prospect. If you pick groups properly, you can easily add 1M+ people to your network within a week. Again, groups are free to join. You can join up to 50 of them.

Join groups your executives and management have joined – the chances are likely to be fishing in the ponds where the prospects are

Join groups your prospects have joined – chances are they are networking with people who are similar to them, and are your future customers (or customers of your competitors!)

Look at profiles of your competitor’s top sales & marketing pros to see what groups they joined – chances are, they know where your prospects hang out

This is just a starter way to grow your network. There are dozens of other great ways to grow your network – just google and get more ideas.

If you connect with me, your 3rd degree network will instantly grow my 1M+; Because my 2nd degree is 1M+

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Grow your LinkedIn network by 2+Million … in two weeks! was last modified: September 15th, 2017 by Chandra Bodapati